The vivid, seafaring novels of Patrick O'Brian have been getting lots of attention since the release of the big-budget movie "Master and Commander." And they were doing all right without the movie: According to O'Brian's editor at Norton, Starling Lawrence, even before the movie came out O'Brian's books sold 4 million copies. "We're not exactly under a rock," he says.

But as popular as the tales of Lucky Jack Aubrey and his notoriously unseaworthy friend and shipboard physician Stephen Maturin are among readers, they are especially revered by real wind-and-mast sailors. To them, O'Brian speaks the secret code of the sheeted main, the furled jib and the main topgallant staysail.

"I've sailed all my life," says Bay Area venture capitalist Tom Perkins, speaking by phone from his vacation home in England, "and O'Brian never made a mistake about the wind or the sails."

Which is why it was such a surprise that when Perkins took O'Brian on an extended sailing trip, he had a startling revelation. O'Brian didn't have a clue about how a sailboat worked.

For true sailors, that seems incomprehensible. They can read an O'Brian novel with the same interactive involvement that a talented chef scans a new cookbook. To them, O'Brian (who died in 2000) was a brother of the sea. In fact, that's why Perkins went out of his way to meet him.

The former general manager of the Hewlett-Packard computer division, Perkins left HP to form the investment firm that became Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers. With investments in startups like Sun Microsystems, Amazon. com, America Online and Genentech, the firm has done very nicely. Or, to put it another way, Perkins is loaded.

And what's the fun of having major money if you can't do something nice on a whim? He asked his wife, best-selling romance novelist Danielle Steel (the two are no longer married) if she thought O'Brian would be offended if Perkins invited him for a sail on his ketch.

As Perkins later recalled in a story for Latitude 38 magazine, Steel replied, "I get about 20,000 letters per year from readers, and I have yet to receive a single one offering to do anything for me. He will be delighted."

And he was. It didn't hurt that Perkins included a photo or two of his "ketch." It was the Andromeda, his 154-foot luxury cruiser. O'Brian took one look and replied that he would "accept your kind offer with perhaps obscene haste."

Perkins was eagerly looking forward to meeting, and sailing, with his literary idol. And although O'Brian was every bit as fascinating, erudite and imposing as expected, there were a few ... quirks.

O'Brian drank like a fish, was uncomfortably stiff and formal, and, frankly, was a risk to knock the boat over. In fact, when Perkins let O'Brian take the helm, the author of 20 books set almost entirely at sea had to be watched constantly in case he got the wind wrong and caused the sails to jibe, or flip backward dangerously.

"He was having a great time (steering the yacht)," Perkins said, "but I had to be right there."

It was not just that O'Brian didn't have a feel for the play of the wind on the sails. Although one of the joys of the novels is the stately progress of the British man-of-war as it drifts along at 10 or 12 knots, it doesn't seem to have registered with O'Brian how slow that actually is. When asked where he would like to go on the two-week cruise, O'Brian mapped out a trip of some 3,000 miles with stops in numerous ports.

"It was crazy," Perkins says. "Clearly he'd never been aboard a boat."

Perkins carefully explained the limits of time and speed, not to mention the delays of putting in to ports, and thought he'd done a pretty good job of laying out what they'd be able to accomplish. And he had, up until moments before they were about to board, when O'Brian asked if it might be possible to stop in Istanbul -- 1,000 miles away.

"And when I said we couldn't," Perkins said, "he acted as if he thought I was kind of cheating him out of his trip."

That was O'Brian. Lawrence, his editor, respected and admired O'Brian deeply, but even he says he could be "exceedingly difficult." Some of that was his carefully cultivated 18th century reserve.

"He deliberately enclosed himself in that period," says Lawrence.

That was something Perkins found when he visited the O'Brian house in the south of France, where O'Brian and his wife, Mary, who typed his hand-written manuscripts, lived. When he toured the library, Perkins noticed two things. First, the walls were lined with books. Second, none of them was more recent than 1820. He was a man of that era.

"I would say we were on the boat for two or three days before he said it was OK to call him Patrick," Perkins said. "Until then we had been calling each other Mr. Perkins and Mr. O'Brian."

It was not, however, as if O'Brian was a prude. In fact, on board the ship he was a bit of a party animal.

"He was a very tiny little man," Perkins says, "but boy, oh boy, could he drink. He'd start with a couple of strong martinis, drink all the way through dinner, then have a couple of brandies afterwards. And yet he never seemed to change."

It should be stressed although O'Brian might have been a little idiosyncratic, Perkins considers his time with him one of the highlights of his life. O'Brian was clearly brilliant -- Perkins calls him a genius -- and the dinner conversation on the ship was fascinating. O'Brian was incredibly well read.

But there was an incident that puzzled Perkins. O'Brian said he was planning to burn all his diaries and journals before he died. One of the guests was shocked and said it would be unfair to biographers. O'Brian, never shy about speaking his mind, lit into the questioner, saying in no uncertain terms that he would not be second-guessed about the decision.

"Of course, later on," Perkins says, "that was much more interesting. Because you always knew he wasn't telling you everything."

That was confirmed after his death, when a biography revealed that he was born Patrick Russ, was English, not Irish, and despite his tales of the sea, had never been a sailor. No wonder he guarded his privacy so carefully.

And yet it had come with a price.

"He really didn't have a lot of close friends," Perkins says. "You know later in life he got a lot of honors. At one point he was given something, not a knighthood, but he got to meet the queen, and he invited me to that. And I just couldn't go. Simply couldn't. I said to him, 'Well, you'll have all your friends there.'